Introduction

In this section, you’ll learn how to configure plugins. One of the core principals of Kong is its extensibility through plugins. Plugins allow you to easily add new features to your API or make your API easier to manage.

As an example, we’ll have you configure the key-auth plugin to add authentication to your API.

1. Configure the plugin for your API

Issue the following cURL request on the previously created API named `mockbin`:
```bash
$ curl -i -X POST \
--url http://localhost:8001/apis/mockbin/plugins/ \
--data 'name=key-auth'
```
**Note:** This plugin also accepts a `config.key_names` parameter, which defaults to `[apikey]`. It is a list of headers and parameters names (both are supported) that are supposed to contain the API key during a request.

2. Verify that the plugin is properly configured

Issue the following cURL request to verify that the [key-auth][key-auth] plugin was properly configured on the API:
```bash
$ curl -i -X GET \
--url http://localhost:8000/ \
--header 'Host: mockbin.com'
```
Since you did not specify the required `apikey` header or parameter, the response should be `403 Forbidden`:
```http
HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
...
{
"message": "Your authentication credentials are invalid"
}
```

Next Steps

Now that you’ve configured the key-auth plugin lets learn how to add consumers to your API so we can continue proxying requests through Kong.